ok. Think I'll have a bit of a ramble. I've been using HelloTalk which I ranted about before, it crashed again.
I'm still watching tons of TV and listening to podcasts. I'm only one film away from the 200 mark on the SC. Reading one of the threads about the ALG(?) method where you listen for 800 hours before doing anything else got me thinking about my French timesink and that is only 300 hours. I've been reading a book in French semi-intensively. I look up words when I don't know but if I don't have an Internet connection I just guess and breeze through. I've only made it to like page 69 of 389 so this looking stuff up all the time is getting a little frustrating. I like my new Kindle gizmo, but something I find frustrating is that although it is light, unlike an actual book, you cannot just stick your thumb in the crease and hold it up and read, you have to hold on to the slightly slippery plastic. I am plowing away at the Anki decks and I've upped the number of new cards so that now I'm getting 50 new cards per day instead of the 25 I was doing previously. This hasn't yet made any impact on the amount of time I need to invest, it is still less than an hour. I've made a rather arbitrary rule that if the Anki thing starts taking me more than an hour, then I'll scale back on reviews and new cards so it comes out to less.
I watched some Steve Kaufman videos which were interviews with people at LangFest and one of them he (or the guest can't remember) said tests are a bit useless because you should be able to know yourself how well you're doing, or how much you've improved. Now I have stated that I want to take the DELF because I want to know what level I'm at. But of course this is a rather arbitrary standard, however it is a standard!
I spent a bit of time thinking about this (because I only have little bits of time these days) and how I feel my French is coming along. I suppose the only response is "slowly but surely". Not progressing as fast as I'd like, but I think I've probably improved some. Certainly my understanding of numbers has increased. Not perfect, but I drill numbers each day with anki and I'm getting better at recognising them when they come up. I'm still very unhappy about my listening comprehension, but I do listen everyday and try to understand as much as I can. I haven't done intensive listening exercises, although I know I should. I plan to, but never seem to get around to it. (bit like marathon training, still haven't started that back up). I am better at recognising the Anki cards I have with audio, and I've improved my shadowing.
Output in French is almost non-existant. Arnaud wrote something in the French Study Group that it is better to just write 2 correct sentences everyday than to do nothing. I have been trying to follow this policy by writing to French people in the HelloTalk app, even if they don't reply, the app crashes, or some other equally annoying thing happens. This however hasn't allowed me to get corrections and I keep thinking I really need a penal. Not a conversation partner or Skype exchange, but just someone to write emails back and forth! I do have at least 3 French native speakers as Facebook friends, simply because I worked for a French company at one point. I have started to write to them only in French. Of course I didn't get any corrections, and they always reply in English, but the point really is for me to make the effort to formulate sentences in French. I'll worry about corrections later, either that or they'll get so bloody annoyed with my poor French they will correct me.
I also looked at language classes in France, but these are way out of my price range, so I gave that idea a miss.
On a side note I watched a couple of episodes of Inspector Montalbano which I hadn't seen before, and it was a real pleasure to watch something that wasn't in French.
I'm more of less expended all the Netflix shows in French that I like, and I'm now watching anything which is in French, including sports documentaries. (*Shudder*) I've returned to watching various Star Trek shows. I'm only a couple of episodes away from watching all of Enterprise, and about 1/2 of the Star Trek NG set. This is like 11-12 series to give some context. I've watched all the Defenders, plus Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and Daredevil in French too. I have also got about halfway through two really poor movies in French which I watch 15 or 20 minutes of until I cannot stand it anymore and switch to something else. I still want to get to the end of them, but I'm not watching them for pleasure, only for the language.
I have been toying with the idea of breaking out a smallwhite spreadsheet and cramming vocabulary and try to ram 1500 words a day into my tiny little mind. The D&D and Cooking decks I've made are really very cool, but the problem is that because I'm only feeding these words to me at a rate of 40-50 per day it isn't really expanding my vocabulary as quickly as I need. In addition the reading doesn't work as fast, especially as I'm only doing semi-extensive reading. I know people say that if you cram then most of them will be lost as soon as you stop, but in reality you'd probably retain 5-10% at least, and if you've crammed say 200,000 words then you'll still have retained 10,000 - 20,000 words. I'm just trying with this idea but since I know I'm really to lazy to do this regularly it probably isn't going to happen. It would take 4-5 months to cram that many words at 1500 per day. But some type of cramming might be useful, so perhaps just using the two sets of words I've already got in a spreadsheet with IPA would help.
Looking back at previous posts by people who are better at this than me:
"... importing 5,000 to 15,000 new words into your brain in 500 to 1,500 hours turns out to be THE major battlefield in language learning, representing 80 percent and more of your total effort."
I can see that I'm falling far short of the targets I should be setting for myself for listening. I've managed about 300 hours (non-continous) in French, but I need to ramp that up considerably. At the moment I'm averaging around 2 hours of French each day call it an hour of podcasts so straightforward listening and an hour of TV (with some cheating using French sub-titles). In order to get to 1500 hours I am 1200 short. I'd like to get that done in 6 months, so that is 200 hours a month, or 6 hours per day. I don't think I could manage that, but I could probably get in 4 hours per day, just doubling what I'm already doing. I have an 3 hour commute most weekdays, and an hour at home to watch TV. But this really eats into reading time, or study of anki reviews.
So if you've managed to stick with me through this long ramble, you can see that I'm still struggling with French, still find Italian easier and still have problems with HelloTalk. All else is commentary.
